RikWriter
Banned
Badly done wars are pretty much the lingua franca of SCi-Fi. I don't really mind them -- though I was spoiled by the fighting in Banks' Excession -- just very good, that one.
Another odd thing -- the current drone attacks in reality (right, I mean the real drones that pick people off more or less at the individual level even if the collateral damage can be high) -- are much stranger than anything I've ever seen in the Bad Wars of Sci fi. The whole drone thing seems very odd -- here are some more or less religious terrorists doing everything for the greater glory of God and then some machine comes over and blows them up after more or less omniscently and omnipotently watching them and judging them from the sky. It's just very strange and yet Sci Fi has never really managed anything quite like that conceptual collision (ominscient, omnipotent drones hunting down religious terrorists).
Not religious terrorists, but armed drones have been around for a while. Look up a short SF story called "Watchbird." I personally don't like armed drones and I made a concerted attempt in my books to come up with reasons why future militaries don't use them. In my Duty, Honor, Planet trilogy, I say in the third book that the reason is the horrible slaughter of refugees carried out by unmanned drones in the aftermath of a nuclear war between Russia and China. It horrified people enough that arming drones is enough to get you strung up. Plenty of unarmed drones around, of course.
In other stories, I make it clear that the communications link between the drones and the operators is too vulnerable to jamming and spoofing, and AI's aren't trusted with weapons.
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